A dancing fire is pretty, as well as tantalizingly dangerous, but there may be a much deeper reason for our attraction to it. Daniel Fessler, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has conducted research that indicates an adult's fascination with fire is a direct consequence of not having mastered it as a child. Fire has been crucial to human survival for around one million years, and in that time, Fessler argues, humans have evolved psychological mechanisms specifically dedicated to controlling it. But because most Westerners no longer learn how to start, maintain and use fire during childhood, we instead wind up with a curious attraction to it -- a burning desire left to languish.
"My preliminary findings indicate that humans are not universally fascinated by fire," Fessler told Life's Little Mysteries. "On the contrary, this fascination is a consequence of inadequate experience with fire during development."
In societies where fire is traditionally used daily as a tool, Fessler has found that children are only interested by fire until such point as they attain mastery of it. After that point -- usually at age 7 -- people display little interest in fire and merely use it as one would use any ordinary tool. "Hence, the modern Western fascination with fire may reflect the unnatural prolongation into adulthood of a motivational system that normally serves to spur children to master an important skill during maturation," Fessler wrote in an email.
Unlike a spider that inherently knows how to weave a web, humans don't instinctively know how to produce and control fire. The ability must be learned during childhood. This may be because there was no universal method of fire building and control among our ancestors, who lived in diverse environments, and so there was no single method for evolution to ingrain in us. Instead, "fire learning" became the instinct. As Fessler put it in an article in the Journal of Cognition and Culture, "The only avenue open to selection processes operating on a species as wide-ranging as ourselves was to rely on learning for the acquisition of the requisite behaviors."
Children are universally fascinated by predatory animals in a similar manner in which they are fascinated by fire. Because both could seriously harm or kill them, evolution requires that they be interested in those subjects, Fessler argues, as a way of ensuring that they pay special attention to information obtained about them. For example, children are naturally curious about which animals are dangerous and which aren't, as well as which materials are flammable and which aren't, and what the consequences are of adding, removing and rearranging objects in a fire. Our brains soak up this predator and fire knowledge.
In the United States, children's natural inclination to learn about fire is evidenced by the hundreds of deaths that occur each year due to "fire play," or the deliberate setting of a fire for no purpose beyond the fire itself. A study by the psychiatrist David Kolko of the University of Pittsburgh found that about three-quarters of children set a play fire during the three-year window of the study (1999-2001). Prior studies found that curiosity was the primary motive for the behavior, which, fire department records show, peaks at age 12.
Read more at Discovery News
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